


All Your Villains: Aldrich Killian

by PumpkinDoodles



Series: All Your Villains [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: All Your Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-15 20:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18676873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PumpkinDoodles/pseuds/PumpkinDoodles
Summary: The Man on the Roof





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note: I own nothing! I keep seeing that “cancel culture” tumblr post where the OP is being slammed for being a Dramione shipper and it made me finally want to write this short fic series I’ve been imagining, all from the POVs of various MCU villains. Not coincidentally, I cannot spell the word villain to save my own life. It’s probably Freudian.

He is weeping on the roof when he decides to do it himself. He knows he needs help from someone, anyone. He just doesn’t want to hurt anymore. So much of him is ache and pain: his lungs are filled with knives when he can’t get air, the dull throb of hips and knees that are chronically out of alignment and wearing away his joints from the moment he wakes and starts weight bearing on them until he sleeps again, ankles that swell like bread dough rises ( _edema, the doctor says, compression hose_ ) when he stands in lines, the waves of real, soul-deep pain when he stutters and sees mirth in someone else’s eyes. He will do it himself, if he has to. He has his mind. He has always had his mind.

The phone call comes a few days later. “Mr. Killian?” Maya’s voice says on the other end. He takes it as a sign. He will take any sign.

She tells him not to test Extremis on himself. But he is so tired. She doesn’t understand his tiredness, he thinks, because she is not constantly in negotiation with the world. Where she sees a two-minute walk to and from the parking lot to their lab, he sees an obstacle course: the high curb he has to clamor over, praying for luck ( _don’t slip again don’t slip again_ ), that he won’t find his legs sliding out from under him ( _the nearest ramp is fifty feet farther away and dangerously textured for his iffy balance on his cane, it would be safer if he was in his wheelchair, but that wears out his arms, the strongest part of him and what he primarily uses in the labs, he used one for awhile, but then there was that torn shoulder muscle and the endless searches for ramps, the inaccessible parts of buildings, everything is a compromise between difficult choices_ ), the walk that feels like forever when it is cold and his joints are stiff, getting around the smokers who cluster around the entrance steps and having to ask them to move so he can use the railing as railing to heft his body up. He is shy by nature; his body makes his shyness excruciating. 

Once, he said excuse me to one of them outside the building and the man leaned his body closer against the railing, either oblivious or fucking with him purposefully. He was forced to stutter it out. “I–I need to u-use th-that,” he’d said.

“Oh, sorry,” the man said, stepping aside and waving his cigarette. Aldrich had tried not to breathe in the smoke. He wonders if the chuckles he hears as he shifts towards the door are aimed at him and hears Tony Stark’s voice in his head ( _when he is not invisible, he is a joke_ ).

He is so tired of devoting this much energy to a two-minute walk. When Maya has left for the day ( _on feet that do not hurt_ ), he gives it to himself and waits. He begins to shake, to convulse in his chair. Across the room, a lab rat circles in its wheel. “Better me than you,” Aldrich whispers to himself, wondering if they will find him dead in the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing! Thanks for your comments and kudos on this series!
> 
> TW for this chapter: mentions of antisemitism, ableism.

He thinks he will feel better when he doesn’t die. For a little while, he does. He can breathe, he can walk, he has seemingly-boundless energy compared to before. That is how he thinks of life. Before. After. For the first time, he realizes precisely how much of his life has been threaded with discomfort and pain. Now that it is gone--the crunch of worn down cartilage behind his knees when he descends steps and his terror of falling has vanished, he can stand fluidly from a chair without needing to pause, assess his balance, re-stabilize himself on a cane, he can speak smoothly, and the muscles in his lower back are no longer like knives if he moves suddenly--he understands how close pain has been, how intimate. His oldest, deepest, most constant friend. Pain. 

 

For awhile, everything is as good as his dreams. 

 

He runs, he swims. The air on his skin is a rush, the water incredible, now that he feels strong enough to trust himself at the deep end, strong enough not to walk into drowning. He starts testing himself, seeing what he can do, what he can lift. For the first time, he really lives in his body, instead of thinking of it as a broken case for his brain, an embarrassing, gross thing. He cuts the hair he used to hide behind. He decorates his new body with tattoos. He is mesmerized by it--it doesn’t feel like him really, but a strange and beautiful thing he is reminded of whenever he passes a mirror--and he cannot quite respond to all the effusive compliments. Inside, he is still the same man he always was and nothing has changed, not really.  

 

But there are things he has not counted on. So many things. He is aware that women didn’t fawn over him before, that he is shy, not outwardly charming. Even if he had wit inside him, tenderness, love, ideas, they are hard to convey from stuttering lips and an unwieldy body. A part of him hoped that being conventional, normal ( _ god how he hates the word normal, always being clinically abnormal _ ) would bring him the love, the notice, the friendship he has never received, despite his stilted attempts to engage with other people, to bridge the gap between normal and abnormal. 

 

He does not imagine that grasping his hopes will turn them to ash. 

 

Now that he moves smoothly, talks smoothly, people actually seek him out. Extremis has given him money, clout, the aura of someone successful, too. People want to be his friend now. They invite him places. He has never been invited places, always snuck in, on the presumption ( _ rightly _ ) that bodyguards are reluctant to throw out a man with a cane because it would make a scene. The first time a woman at a party reaches out and touches him, unbidden, he almost jumps out of his skin. “I’m sorry,” he says axiomatically. Has he bumped her? The only people who touch him are healthcare providers and people who shove him for walking too slowly. 

 

The woman laughs. Her laugh is like music. Nobody has ever made that particular sound at him before.

 

Later, after.  _ After. _ After, when they are in bed together and she rests her head on his shoulder, he cannot shut off the vitriol that seeps into his brain, the anger that threads through him, anger he’s never felt before.

 

_ Wouldn’t look at you twice before. Would loathe someone like you touching her. Would find you repulsive, disgusting. Now, though, now she can’t keep her hands off you. Nothing inside you matters to anyone. Not your mind, just your looks. Just the outside, just the normal, just the beautiful, the strong-- _

 

“Something wrong?” she says, feeling his body go tense.

“No, nothing,” he says. “You’d like me if I was less cute, right? I had an awkward phase until I was about thirty-five,” he jokes.

“Aldrich,” she says, “don’t be ridiculous, you were always adorable.”  But he cannot forget the look in her eyes when she sees an old photograph of him. Is it his imagination, or does her shock contain horror, too? They break up soon after and he burns all his old photographs in the fireplace.

 

He remembers reading an essay in college about passing and sitting up, smoking pot with his freshman year roommate, Dan Green. Dan was Jewish, but nobody ever guessed. He’d looked at Aldrich, eyes glazed, and laughed. “You’ll never know,” he’d said, with the profound certainty of the truly smashed. 

“Never know what?” Aldrich said then.

“How they really feel about you. They’ll never say it to your face, just when they think you’re not in the room,” Dan had said. “If my name was Greenberg, I’d hear a lot less fucking jokes about rabbis and  _ jewing down _ and Barbra Striestand, let me fucking tell you. Fuck assimilation. Never assimilate, Al.”

“Don’t think I fucking can,” Aldrich had said, gazing at his disobedient legs and shrugging.

 

He’s assimilated now. 

 

People tell jokes about parking in handicapped parking spots, about euthanasia, about ending social programs, about  _ those useless people _ to his face now. They think he’ll laugh.

That never happened before. He finds himself curdling inside, all hostility, always angry, always resentful. He knows too much and he feels everything, how people value him now where they didn’t before, and he hates them.  He sees a therapist. She tells him he didn’t have an ugly body before. “Really?” he says sharply. “Well, what the fuck would you call it?”

“Challenging?” she offers. “Difficult?”

If before, he was a kind man in an ug-- _ a difficult body _ , he corrects--he feels himself becoming sick inside afterwards. The better he looks on the outside and the more people fawn over him, the sicker he feels.

  
  


Then they find a problem with Extremis.

  
  



End file.
